Hope is good if it makes you take constructive action, but not if you keep doubling down on the same rigid strategy over and over again. It can even be good to be slightly delusional in life if it makes you take a trajectory which is proactive and constructive, which is why some forms of overconfidence are better than most forms of self-loathing.
But like everything, this has its limits, because every idea can be taken too far. As I have written about in a previous post about the delusions of technological progress, doubling down on myths that ask Reality to behave differently than how it does is a lost cause, though a popular one. Our technology will not keep progressing forever because our energy base is utterly reliant on fossil fuels, a non-renewable basis, and pretending otherwise is not "hopeful", it is incredibly destructive because it is a denial of Reality.
What does constructive hope look like in contrast? Think for instance of an artist pursuing their craft, and pouring their love into practicing it and expressing beauty. Perhaps they are naive for thinking that they could make a living for it, especially in our market-driven world, but even if it doesn't work out financially speaking, they have produced something which is inherently good and which is meaningful for them and others. Their actions and beliefs are directionally good, even if they are not fully calibrated to Reality.
Of course, their optimism can be naive, but my point is that a reasonable amount of self-delusion can lead to great things and potentially self-correct, whereas extreme optimism or pessimism would cause you to get stuck in your own echo chamber: that you can't possibly fail in the former, or that you can't possibly succeed in the latter. If you put yourself out there because you have a reasonable expectation that you can make it, then you will naturally receive feedback from the world and you will, over time, adjust to a more accurate view of what people want, what you are good at, and what you yourself want to make. This is good, even if it can be slightly delusional once again.
Let me use more granular terms than "hope" to see in which contexts it is useful and in which it isn't. I distinguish between four different types of hope:
§1. Individual self-efficacy, the sense that you can learn and get better at the things you set out to do. This doesn't mean that you will be the greatest in any endeavor you take up, that would be naive grandiosity, but it means that you've had an experience with learning and struggling with things which informs you that you can, if you put your mind to it, progressively get better and weed out the mistakes you do over time.
It is worth noting that self-efficacy is about how you perform in certain tasks, as opposed to let's say self-confidence which is more about you as a person. In assessing your own self-efficacy, you want to make non-judgemental observations about your capacity and what you can improve in a given context, whereas self-confidence would be the general relationship you have with yourself. Self-efficacy is thus contextual and impersonal, self-confidence is more general and personal, and thus more prone to delusions and self-biased justifications, the way that people feel the need to make positive affirmations in front of a mirror to keep their ego from crumbling, instead of taking specific actions to fix their life. Self-efficacy focuses on what you can change, self-confidence can be a dangerous game of navel-gazing, though it can also be approached in a more healthy, grounded manner.
§2. Communal trust, the sense that you are surrounded by people who are on your side, and who you enjoy being with and want to help out too. Communities are quite small compared to the scales of modern society, we could think of it as an extended family, with a center compromised of those closest to you, who are your real family or not, and then slightly more "distant" people with whom you interact less frequently, but still get a sense of kinship from.
Trust is crucial in our lives, because we must necessarily depend on other people, and those who can't trust others have a way of perpetuating their distruct, because it makes them controlling in their lives. The myth of the self-sustaining individual is a complete fantasy, because you either depend on people you don't acknowledge, or on technology which other people have built, and which relies on external outputs of energy (namely, fossil fuels). The problem is that trust can only arise from living with other people for enough time to build a natural sense of trust, because credentials can always be gamed, whereas living with someone through hardships is rock-solid evidence that we can trust one another.
§3. Societal hope, the sense that the society in which we are embedded is stable enough for us to go about our plans without worrying about criminality, rackets and societal collapse. For most of human life, there was no "society", people simply lived in small nomadic communities revolved around hunting and gathering. Then with the advent of agriculture, people were part of a greater whole which they couldn't necessarily interact with, but at least they were still engaged in productive activities, such as farming, woodworking, smithing, and that type of stuff.
All of that changed with modern societies, where the individual is now completely dependent on a byzantine system of interlocking institutions and global supply chains, all of which are utterly dependent on non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels and mineral resources. People have hope that such a system can go on forever because they have no other choice for living, like a zoo animal convincing itself and others that the zoo it lives in will always provide what it needs. I do not consider this a positive version of hope, but more later.
§4. Universal faith, the sense that you live in a Reality which is fundamentally Good, rather than the alienating and cold universe that scientifically-minded people say we live in. Good doesn't mean nice or coddling however, because death, pain, loss and uncertainty are inevitable aspects of our life. This is something that every real culture had to grapple with: how do we live well in a Universe which isn't always accomodating to our needs? Is it good to be alive, or is our existence bound to be a wretched and confused one?
It is impossible to convey to the self-informed self what is good about life, because goodness has a core of ineffability to it, a core which we could reasonably call 'God', though that word has become so corrupted over time that it is also useful not to use it. Perhaps 'faith' is then not the right word either, because it can interpreted as a way of giving up responsibility for your own life. "Oh I don't know what it means to be a good person or how to live well, let me just have 'faith' in this doctrine".
But if we mean 'faith' as a recognition that the literal-causal mind can only know so much, and that what is good, beautiful and loving in life comes to me not through knowledge, but through my own experience, the fact that I am a part of Reality experiencing itself, then 'faith' means something more like "faith in the situation that I am in". Not struggling against it, arguing about how Reality should be different than it is, but accepting it fully so that one may act aptly upon it. I have faith that Reality wants me to overcome this challenge, or wants me to integrate an aspect of myself that I have suppressed, and I will answer to the call.
Obviously when we say that "Reality wants something", we are using a metaphor, but the place from which the metaphor comes from is not mere wishful thinking, it comes from an intimate contact with Reality and the situation it presents us with, a surrender of my self that makes me see clearly what is going, and what I can do about it.
I think that all of them are good and important to develop except number three, societal hope. Why is that? Because society is self-informed. It has its own agenda of growth that it will pursue at all costs. It is not guided by conscious human values, but rather it is fuelled by unconsciousness, which is why less conscious (and thus less empathic, courageous, free and joyous) people tend to do better within society, because they do not have to go against their nature as much as the more conscious ones.
Why would you expect a world driven by game theorical relationships, which then drive companies to maximize profits as much as possible, otherwise they get outcompeted by others, to lead to goodness? It is madness to pretend that the technological system is inherently good when we see what the most powerful companies and institutions do with their power. Not just because of the decisions they make, but the fact that their decisions couldn't be otherwise.
Even if the CEO of a powerful company had a change of heart, and even if their decisions had as much weight as people thought they had, they wouldn't be able to meaningfully change the company, because each company is kept in check by others, and by the drive for profits that arises from their interactions. In other words, the behavior of the monsters at the top is overdetermined. If you could fire all the "evil" CEOs, they would get simply get replaced by other ones, because the resulting dynamics of the technological system necessarily implies that everything devolves into a race to the bottom eventually. 1
The same is true for politics, the news, governments, the internal dynamics within any company or institution, and much more. Externalities arise because fundamentally, no local agent has to take responsibility for the whole, and can thus optimize for their own competitive advantages even if it makes the whole worse off.
In that environment of races to the bottom, why would anyone have hope that the system could self-correct? I don't, and I think it is very destructive to pretend that it is the case, that we can either nudge the system towards being better, which is futile at best, or even that we could engineer systems that don't run into those issues. But this is for another piece.
The major problem I have at the end of the day is that societal hope puts all of your agency in self-motivated systems on which you have no control whatsoever. Unlike Reality at large however, those systems are self-motivated which means that they will always pursue their own interests rather than what benefits the whole, even if it leads to societal collapse at large, which is happening right now and will only get worse in the coming decades. To be constructive means to put your energy in something that works, or at least have reasonable chances of working, but to double down on the system and hope that it will work out okay is just utterly naive.
People don't know how bad things can get because as a collective, we have a very short memory 2, especially in the age of the internet, and because we've had the privilege of cheap energy for several centuries now. But the way I see it, when the diminished access to energy will start out a cascade of societal problems, then people will be confronted with the value of real hope, the kind that allows you to face hardships and do more with less, and to see the broader context in which your pain and your struggles make sense, rather than the kind of naive hope that makes you wish for you privileges to be there forever, without you having to change in any way as a person.
As Chekhov wrote: 3
The bourgeoisie loves so-called ‘positive’ types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.
1 There is much more to say about this, both in terms of justifications but also in terms of consequences, but that will be for another piece.
2 Even the crises of the Great Depression, and of the two World Wars are hardly remembered today as anything but series of facts that students have to memorize, rather than entire periods that real human beings went through during many difficult years.
3 Anton Chekhov, Letter to A.S. Suvorin
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Distraction Copehope Collapse Technosystem Gametheory
2026-04-13